#but also yeah having soooo much gale doesnt just undermine Peeta’s character development and the development of their relationship

[babygirlgiles]

I think one of my biggest critiques about Catching Fire as a movie is that there’s entirely too much Gale in it. And I’m not just saying this as a Peeta Girlie, I’m saying this because Gale’s palpable absence is so strong at the beginning of the book that it’s a presence within and of itself and that’s central to the first part of the story!! The fact that Peeta is there when Gale isn’t is key to showing How The Games Have Effected Katniss!!

Katniss is experiencing this meteoric rise in economic class practically overnight. She’s gained an immense amount of privilege, relatively speaking, at an immense cost (the trauma of the Games, the damage to her emotional and mental well-being, the damage to her sense of self, the increased risk that immediate harm might come to her family and loved ones). She’s realizing that she really was part of her community before the Games by virtue of being distanced from that same community now. Because that’s what the Games, and the resulting class hyper-mobility, did to her: it’s set her apart from her peers. And Gale being absent is part of that. She doesn’t have to go to school. She doesn’t have to hunt or trade at the Hob. She doesn’t have to join the district’s industry. But Gale does have to do all those things. It’s why they only ever see each other on Sundays, the one day of the week he isn’t in the minds. It’s why they have increasingly little to talk about when they do meet, because their lives are so vastly different now and because the things that do occupy Katniss’s days are things generally related to her stratospheric class leap and/or the horrific cost of that leap, things she either doesn’t want to talk about or straight up can’t talk about.

She’s had this seismic shift in her life that’s detached her from her world and turned her into an island. Peeta and Haymitch (and to a lesser degree her mom and Prim) are the only ones that have been metaphorically cast out to sea like her. That’s why they’re a constant presence in the beginning of the book when Gale is not. And that’s why adding in scenes with Gale to the beginning of the movie (or keeping in scenes with Gale at the cost of like. literally every other thing that happens in that part of the book, including all the time she spends with Peeta and the others) undermines that point.